The Springfield Elementary School's Math team is competing against Waverly Hills Elementary's math team, in an event organized by Benjamin, Doug and Gary. Lisa yells their poor school will surprise them all, which they do...by scoring no points at all. This makes her sad, because Waverly Hills Elementary is much richer than Springfield Elementary. Seeing Lisa's sadness, the nerds decide to modernize Springfield Elementary School by giving each student a tablet connected to a school network, replacing the blackboards with a giant touch screen device, and even making a 3D printing lab.

Since all books are now digital, Principal Skinner decides to burn the "old" paper books. But when the students discover the password to get outside the school's network, a meltdown in the server breaks every single digital device in the school. As all the paper books were destroyed, the teachers have nothing they can use to teach the students. Miss Hoover shows a movie on her cellphone, but Lisa can't see it because other students are blocking her view. Unable to see the movie, she looks out the window and sees Groundskeeper Willie using a rope with some equally spaced knots to measure some grass patches. This gives Lisa the idea to turn the school into a Waldorf school, based on hands-on activities and creative play.

All the kids like the new system, and Willie is promoted to math team coach. While teaching the math team, Willie sees Superintendent Chalmers is abusing his services and tries to chase him down. During the chase, Bart throws an egg and hits Chalmers in the head, making him crash his car into a tree. Surprised by Bart's capacity of calculating angles, Willie invites Bart to be the new math team captain. Later, the Waverly Hills Elementary and Springfield Elementary math teams have a rematch, but Bart didn't know there would be math (even with Lisa saying there would be nothing but math). The new score is more balanced (29-29), even with Bart answering some questions wrong, but nobody knows how to answer the last question: in a M shaped figure, the competitors have to draw three straight lines to form 9 non-overlapping triangles. That's when Bart remembers the "M" shaped hair on Homer's head and finds out the solution to the problem, leading the Springfield Elementary's Math Team to win the competition.

On September 26, 2014; while in a conference in the Science Museum of London, Al Jean told that there would be a future episode with the following plot: "It will have Lisa on a math team and features the most complicated math jokes we [The Simpsons crew] can think of." [5][6]

The episode received a 1.3 rating and was watched by a total of 2.82 million people. Dennis Perkins of The A.V. Club gave the episode a D, saying "as the final act of 'Mathlete's Feat', the final episode of the 26th season of The Simpsons went to commercial, I was genuinely pissed at how disjointed, lazy, and downright lousy this season finale was."